Thursday, April 10, 2008

Flowing

I have the soul of a traffic engineer. I just don't have the training, or the smarts. Is that important? I love knowing how you move mass quantities of things, mass quantities of people. I love reading about things like this, and I love it when I hear about people planning to redo traffic flows. Flow delights me. Even phrases like 'laminar flow' please me, and they don't have hardly anything to do with traffic flow. For that matter, the concept of turbulence pleases me. (The actuality, not so much.) But traffic, oh, yeah. On our local Main Drag, they're starting work to build a new off ramp, so that they can close a different one, so that they can put a traffic light on a third one, so they can reroute flow in the other direction. At that point, I'm not exactly sure what the heck is going on, but I like it. It's cool.

I'm just a go with the flow guy, I guess.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Read this post and thought of this comic.
http://explosm.net/comics/1082/
Not intended to be an insult to you, but I just thought it was funny.

Cerulean Bill said...

Thats funny -- if I were to pick one, it'd have been the XKCD one with the traffic engineer leaping on the hood of the car. But this'll do...

Unknown said...

Ah yes I remember that one. Would have been my second choice hah, I do love XKCD.

Cerulean Bill said...

All the best people do!

Angie said...

I'm an engineer and I have still often thought that I wished I was qualified to do traffic engineering. :) Love that simulator--I had to bookmark it for more fun.
:)

Cerulean Bill said...

My wife's first boyfriend was a traffic engineer (I think he was an intern at the time). He said he spent HOURS sitting in a car, taking notes...sounds quite captivating at the micro level, right? But at the MACRO level... oh, yeah, that does sound cool.